The Ritz-Carlton, Hong Kong has finally opened and boasts the title of “highest hotel in the world”, taking the title away from Dubai.

Originally located in the Central district, the hotel ceased operation in the beginning of the year 2008.

After three years of disappearance, the hotel is now reborn. Located at the very top of the International Commerce Centre (ICC) in the West Kowloon district and occupying floors 102 to 118.

This stylish and contemporary hotel’s major selling point is the magnificent panoramic view of Hong Kong. Guests will be welcomed into the arrival lobby on the 9th floor before being transported up to the hotel lobby on the 103rd floor where breathtaking views of Victoria Harbour and the iconic Hong Kong skyline greet them.

Recently, the title for the “World’s Most Expensive Dog” was snatched by China – again. A red Tibetan Mastiff, named “Hong Dong”, was sold for 10 million yuan (around $1.5 million) to a coal baron from North of China. Before the sale, the World’s most expensive dog was another Tibetan Mastiff who was sold in 2009 for 4 million yuan ($608,680).

“Hong Dong”, is 11-months-old but already stands nearly three-feet-high at the shoulder and weighs more than 180lbs, according to his breeder, Lu Liang. “He is a perfect specimen,” said Mr Lu, who runs the Tibetan Mastiff Garden in Laoshan, near the eastern Chinese city of Qingdao. “He has excellent genes and will be a good breeding dog.” “The price is justified,” he said. “We have spent a lot of money raising this dog, and we have the salaries of plenty of staff to pay.”

According to Mr Lu, the Tibetan Mastiff was fed a diet of chicken and beef, spiced up with exotic Chinese delicacies such as sea cucumber and abalone. That sounds like a luxurious life even for a human. Considering that abalone is something most living in China will never taste in their entire life, I would say that most would wish to rather be reincarnated as this dog.

But is a rare breed and an opulent style of nurturing worth such a high price? The new owner definitely thinks so. The male dog can be hired out to other breeders for as much as 100,000 yuan a shot, so it can be considered more as an investment than pet.

Tibetan Mastiffs are huge and fierce guard dogs that have stood watch over nomad camps and monasteries on the Tibetan plateau for centuries. They are thought to be one of the world’s oldest breeds, and legend has it that both Genghis Khan and Lord Buddha kept them.

More recently, however, they have become highly-prized status symbols for China’s new rich. The dogs are thought to be a pure “Chinese” breed and they are rarely found outside Tibet, giving them an exclusivity that other breeds cannot match.

At 26.4 miles long, the Qingdao Haiwan Bridge would easily cross the English Channel and is almost three miles longer than the previous record-holder, the Lake Pontchartrain Causeway in the American state of Louisiana.Continue reading »

Chinese gamers are really serious and seriously rich. Take this gamer for instance: unhappy that a competing guildmaster in the Chinese MMO Magic World Online 2 got to play in an IMAX theater, he came up with a way to play on a bigger screen. Not just a bigger screen, in fact, the World’s largest LED display. This display, measuring at 250-meter-long and 30-meter-wide, is so big that it is called the “skyscreen”. It is located in, The Place, a high-end mall in Beijing.

The most insane thing about the whole stunt is that the gamer paid RMB 100,000 (around USD 15,000) for just 10 minutes of game time. This may also earn him the title for the gamer who “wasted the most money in the least amount of time”.

Other rich Chinese gamers will have to wait until the LED screen in Dubai which will become the World’s largest when completed, before beating this record.

First, the absurd economic growth and now usurping the West in technological advancements.

Here’s some technical jargon from Engadget:

“The fully operational Tianhe-1A, located at the National Supercomputer Center in Tianjin, scored 2.507 petaflops as measured by the LINPACK benchmark. That moves it past Cray’s 2.3 petaflops Jaguar located at Oak Ridge National Lab in Tennessee. Tianhe-1A achieved the record using 7,168 NVIDIA Tesla M2050 GPUs and 14,336 Intel Xeon CPUs consuming 4.04 megawatts.”

Just to note: I’m actually being sarcastic. I don’t think China is ahead of anybody technologically.